Wine Products You’ll Actually Use
These wine gadgets rose to the top of the list.
Wine Opener
Wine Decanter
Not all wines benefit as strongly from decanting, and often just opening the bottle a few minutes before serving will do the trick. However, wine decanters can be great tools for removing sediment in certain wines to improve the texture and overall taste of the wine. For full-bodied red wines, try a decanter with a wide base ($50, Pottery Barn) but stick with a standard decanter ($50, Williams Sonoma) for medium-bodied red wines.
Wine Chiller
The general rule of chilling wine is to put red wine in the refrigerator for 15 minutes before opening, and take white wine that’s been chilling all day out of the refrigerator for 15 minutes before opening. But for times when a wine refrigerator is not an option, electric wine chillers can save the day. The Vinotemp Single Bottle Wine Chiller ($190, Williams Sonoma) can bring a Champagne or white wine to perfect serving temperature using thermoelectric technology, while the Vinglacé portable wine chiller ($90, Nordstrom) is vacuum-insulated to keep the wine chilled for hours.
Wine Aerator
Aerating wine is very similar to aerating your lawn, where the added oxygen helps the wine to breathe after being bottled up for so long. Aeration improves its overall quality faster than simply opening the bottle and leaving it out, removing harsh sulfites and letting the wine become more expressive. You could simply pour the wine and swirl it in your glass to aerate it, but an aeration funnel like the Üllo Chill Wine Purifier ($90, Williams Sonoma) will not only remove sulfites but also bring the wine to an ideal cellar temperature—all in a matter of minutes.
Wine Glasses
Coravin
It’s been over a decade since the Coravin wine preservation system ($150, Williams Sonoma) first entered the market, and the world has never been the same. This innovative system allows you to pour a single glass of wine from a bottle without ever removing the cork, allowing the bottle to remain unopened. The company now has a Bluetooth-enabled Model Eleven and a Coravin Sparkling system that can extend the life of sparkling wines for a minimum of two weeks.
Wine Stopper
While shoving the cork back into a bottle was once the standard for preserving the remaining wine in a bottle, modern wine stoppers can extend the life of an opened bottle for up to two months. A simple Champagne stopper ($10, Williams Sonoma) can keep bottles fizzy for a day (maybe two), but the Repour Winesaver fits directly on a 750-ml bottle and eliminates all of the oxygen in the bottle so the wine does not turn.
